El presente estudio sobre las causas directas y subyacentes de deforestación y degradación de los bosques en Guinea Ecuatorial se ha realizado en el marco del proceso de desarrollo de la Estrategia Nacional REDD+ (EN-REDD+) y del Plan Nacional de Inversión REDD (PNI-REDD+). La EN-REDD+ y el PNI-REDD+ aspiran a guiar y apoyar los esfuerzos de todas las partes implicadas en la implementación de REDD+ , que tiene como objetivo reducir las emisiones, aumentar el secuestro de carbono en los bosques y mejorar la gestión y conservación de las reservas forestales de carbono.

This FAO Legal Paper looks at and evaluates the present laws and policies relating to sustainable small-scale fisheries in the fisheries and aquaculture legislation in operation in Sierra Leone and makes recommendations to align them with the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (VGGT). This Paper provides a brief introduction of the fisheries sector in Sierra Leone, focusing on the small-scale sect or with an overview of the uses and access rights to resources.

Soil erosion is a natural process causing serious land degradation problems. In Tunisia, soil
erosion represents a serious environmental problem. The Rmel watershed located in the
Governorate of Zaghouan in north-eastern Tunisia and covering an area of 679 square
kilometers, suffers from this problem. It was thus selected to estimate annual soil loss using the
Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE), and geographic information system (GIS).
RUSLE model’s parameters (R, K, LS, C, and P) were derived from digital elevation model

The biosphere reserve model is a global designation in accordance with UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere Programme. Biosphere reserves are required to fulfil three functions as prescribed by UNESCO, namely conservation, sustainable development and logistic support. Worldwide, the 669 biosphere reserves in 120 countries are experiencing different degrees of effectiveness in fulfilling these functions.

Private forests are widespread in Europe providing a range of ecosystem services of significant value to society, and there are calls for novel policies to enhance their provision and to face the challenges of environmental changes. Such policies need to acknowledge the importance of private forests, and importantly they need to be based on a deep understanding of how property rights held by private forest owners vary across Europe. We collected and analysed data on the content of property rights based on formal legal requirements existing in 31 European jurisdictions.

This paper offers solutions to some of the challenges around maintaining productive agricultural land close to cities in countries facing a decline in urban populations. In such circumstances, some farmers have been observed to convert their land into real estate and leave farming before land prices decline, therefore decreasing the area of agricultural land close to large cities. In contrast, many suburban farmers in developed countries remain in farming even when land prices decline and suburbs shrink.

We analyze the impact of land fragmentation on production diversification in rural Albania. Albania represents a particularly interesting case for studying land fragmentation as the fragmentation is a direct outcome of land reforms. The results indicate that land fragmentation is an important driver of production diversification of farm households in Albania. We find that land fragmentation stimulates significantly more diversification for subsistence farm households than for market-oriented households.

In recent years conflicts of land expropriation in China have received a lot of concern. Recent systematic reviews highlight causes, types and resolution of land conflicts, yet very few of these studies have considered the spatial-temporal characteristics of the issue. Utilizing spatial statistical analysis and statistical software, this paper aims to build a contextual overview on Chinese land expropriation conflicts and explore spatial and temporal distribution of it during 2006–2016. Correlations of land conflict intensity with per capita GDP and urbanization rate have been studied.

Effectiveness of Agri-Environmental Schemes (AESs) as tools to enhance the rural environment can be achieved not only by increasing uptake rates, but also by avoiding participating farmers abandoning the scheme once they are in. For this reason, it is important to also consider what affects farmers’ decisions to remain in the scheme rather than leave it at the end of the contractual obligation. However, up to now, there has been very little on this issue in the literature.

Cash crops have kept expanding at an accelerating rate across the globe during the last decades. It therefore requires elaborate efforts to examine the socioeconomic and ecological consequences of cash crop cultivation. With a case of the Hangzhou region in subtropical China, this paper investigated the dynamic patterns of four cash crop types (tea, fruit, mulberry and nursery) at town level by using aerial photos; and then quantified the subsequent socioeconomic and ecological consequences using spatial regression.

After forest governance reforms by the Brazilian government, Amazon deforestation rates dropped by almost 80% between 2004 and 2012. Since then, however, deforestation has slowly increased again, casting doubts on the long-term sustainability of past conservation policy achievements. Clearly, deforestation rates and the associated local drivers of land-use and land-cover change differ considerably across the region, and adapting public policies to dynamic local contexts and actor constellations remains a major challenge for decision-makers.

Informed by the ‘quality of life’ model with specific reference to Chinese culture, this article uses reliable and publicly available information seldom used in historical or heritage study to identify the designs of flats and builders of the “Kowloon Walled City” (hereafter the City) and reliable oral testimonies to refute some myths about the quality of life within it. This settlement has been notoriously misrepresented by some as a city of darkness that was razed from the face of the Earth before 1997 to fulfill a pre-war dream of the colonial government.